Okay, so Elton was singing about Marilyn Monroe (first) and Diana (the second time) and not Bill Gates’s suddenly disenfranchised older operating systems. And it wouldn’t be the dogs of society howling, it would would be the Linux fanatics laughing and corporate IT managers crying. But Scoble has the lowdown from the inside on the sayonara: after this Sunday (6/30/02), system vendors will no longer be allowed, contractually, to ship PC systems with any version of Windows other than some flavor of Windows XP installed. To paraphrase another great artist of the ’70s, “Buy XP or we’ll shoot this dog!”
Update: Joshua Allen, a Microsoft employee who blogs, comments indirectly on this topic in a post titled Programming Soviet. Unusual for Joshua, he misses this one like a homerun hitter whiffing on a changeup, and claims that people complaining about forced upgrades must misunderstand the situation. But, one wonders, what about the people who don’t want certain wonderful new features (*cough* product activation *cough*) in XP?
And Joshua, if you happen to read this, what about Palladium? Is Cringely so far off base?
BillSaysThis 
